Does your storage need a re-think

IDC’s Digital Universe Study predicts a staggering 10x growth from now by 2020.

If you are struggling with volumes now, think ahead to what it is going to be like in a few years’ time, and ask yourself this question: Is your current storage strategy going to cope?

It likely you are going to say ‘no’

Whatever type of organisation you work for, there are four clear signs that you should be re-thinking your storage strategy.

#1 COST: You are experiencing problems with the cost of storing data.  With many organisations finding 30% plus per annum a ‘normal’ growth rate, and many more about to find this is the case in the near future, paying the additional hardware, software and maintenance cost is a big issue.

#2. END OF LIFE problems: Forklift upgrades are increasing in frequency as you outgrow your existing arrays and appliances, thus generating downtime which in turn generates friction with the business.

#3. SERVICE TO THE BUSINESS: It is a struggle to meet your end user SLAs. You are regularly breaking your agreement with the business – maybe you are going through the digital transformation process and that is shortening your backup window as systems need to be permanently online – and generate data 24/7.

#4 GOVERNANCE: You have got lots of remote offices and replicating data across multiple sites is becoming a problem – often a problem you just have to fix because regulation gets tighter and tighter every year, and requirements for rapid retrieval are rendering your tape archive obsolete.

Cynics might note that the above four issues between them cover just about every large enterprise and a healthy chunk of SMEs. That is no mistake: it is just what the future looks like.

The good news is that can make a huge dent in your storage costs by moving to open source software defined storage that leverage industry standard servers, and commodity drives. You can avoid forklift upgrades altogether by using an approach that allows you to add as many nodes as you like – infinite scalability without downtime. You can kiss goodbye to missed backup windows by keeping more on disk, and you can distribute data all over the globe – anywhere you have got a footprint.

Alternatively, you could keep doing what Einstein defined as madness: the same thing, over and over again, expecting different results.

Learn how SUSE can help you scale up, scale out, and slash costs at:

https://www.suse.com/solutions/software-defined-storage/

Disk to disk backup challenges?   Check out –  https://www.suse.com/d2d